Rating: 
Summary: This is a horrid book.
Review: I think that this book could make ANYONE dislike rednecks. The auther talks about how it is fine for white people to call black people the "N" word, but thinks that it is just evil for a black person to say "Hick". Sure, whites were slaves also, but who owned them? Whites. Whites owning whites is a hell of a lot different than a white owning a black. Whites were consittered to be HUMAN. Blacks were consittered to be 3/5 of a human. And on top of the the only reason that black slaves were consittered to be human at all was so Southern states would get more votes in the House. Please don't support this rotten book.
Rating: 
Summary: timely invitation to jettison liberal shame
Review: What Goad has to say would be great philosophical panacea for self-loathing ivory tower highbrow liberal whites and cultural transvestite "wiggas" alike. Pity they'll never read this, or pre-judge it so as to be able to condemn it outright.Painstakingly cited throughout, this book really drives home the notion that the lower classes of 'Merica have been divided and placed against each other. One great moment in the book some (p)reviewers must have missed - Goad discusses what a nightmare it would be for the upper crust if poor whites and blacks quit fighting each other and united to vanquish a common enemy.
Rating: 
Summary: A Tough Read But Worth It
Review: Initially, I just thought this was a somewhat humorous tirade about the class system in America. But, right away, Goad describes the horrors of indentured servitude among the white underclass. While slaveowners mistreated their slaves, they knew that they had an investment in the people they owned. Indentured servants, because of the finite term they served, were used as hard as possible to get the most work out of them before their term was up. This caused a huge rate of fataility among such people. This is one of the number of tidbits of history you don't get in your "normal" history book. I think that the material covered is valuable for many an armchair historian and fear that the tone of the book and Goad's free hand with profanity and ethnic slurs (which I suspect are intended to amuse and make a point of "we're all in this together down in the underclass") will deter the more sensitive reader from taking in the information in this book.
Rating:
Summary: REDNECK MANIFESTO
Review: PART HISTORY, PART RANT, BUT ENTIRELY A GOOD READ... BEING A LITERATE BLUE COLLAR WORKER I FOUND ALOT OF WHAT MR.GOAD WROTE TO HAVE HIT HOME... WHILE HE WILL RANT ON LIBERALS HE MAKES IT PLAIN THAT HE DOESN'T LIKE CONSERVATIVES EITHER... IT'S BASICALLY LIMOSINE LIBERALS THAT IS HIS FOCUS OF ANGER OR RATHER THE ESTABLISHMENT REGARDLESS OF WHAT IT LABELS ITSELF... HE DOESN'T DENY THE INJUSTICES DONE TO BLACK FOLKS, INDIANS OR OTHER MINORITIES WHICH HE ACKNOWLEDGES, BUT ASSERTS THE VERY SELDOM TOLD STORIES OF WHAT HAS HAPPENED AND CONTINUES TO HAPPEN TO AMERICA'S UNDERCLASS... YOU MAY AGREE WITH EVERYTHING THAT MR.GOAD SAYS BUT YOU HAVE TO ADMIT THAT HE HAS AN EXCELLENT COMMAND OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE... HE KIND OF LIKE JOHN STEINBECK CROSSED WITH HUNTER S. THOMPSON WITH A PINCH OF STUDS TERKEL THROWN IN... HIS WRITING HAD IMPROVED SINCE HIS "ANSWER ME" DAY...
Rating:
Summary: A history that is mostly untold and still ignored
Review: Goad writes probably the only account of the white underclass American culture has ever seen. White slavery in the U.S., the relativity of power (i.e., how poor whites are similar to poor blacks in social status), the cultural legacy of poor, white trash, and why it's safe, if not culturally encouraged, to trash lower-class whites, are some of numerous topics covered. While Goad misses a larger cultural significance (see, e.g., Daniel Quinn), he does add to the history of white people never before told, and, in fact, manages to do so in a way that reflects how he feels about the fact that this story has been ignored. The ill-at-ease with this subject will steer clear--with the danger of remaining uninformed about a vital portion of human history. Vital.
Rating:
Summary: An untold story of the white underclass in America
Review: Subtitled "America's Scapegoats: How we got that way and why we're not going to take it anymore," Goad writes probably the only account of the white underclass American culture has ever seen. White slavery in the U.S., the relativity of power (i.e., how poor whites are similar to poor blacks in social status), the cultural legacy of poor, white trash, and why it's safe, if not culturally encouraged, to trash lower-class whites, are some of numerous topics covered. While Goad misses a larger cultural significance (see, e.g., Daniel Quinn), he does add to the history of white people never before told, and, in fact, manages to do so in a way that reflects how he feels about the fact that this story has been ignored. The ill-at-ease with this subject will steer clear--with the danger of remaining uninformed about a vital portion of human history. Vital.
Rating:
Summary: Another apology for white supremacy.
Review: This is a very simple minded approach to understanding the tenuous position of poor whites. If class is more important than race, then why do poor whites, in general, despise people of color more than middle class whites? If the "class-over-race" argument were true, poor whites wouldn't be blaming people of color for taking "their" jobs. Instead, their so-called class consciousness would have them organizing against corporate, white powers (see for example the movie "Harlan County, USA". The racism of poor whites blinds them from binding with people of color to overthrow the middle class. Meanwhile, middle class whites use poor whites as a scapegoat for middle class white racism. In that, I agree on some lever with the author. However, the author and other conservatives use this argument to perpetuate the white supremacist notion that poor whites are not racial beings. They use poor whites as a way of distancing the claims by people of color and radical whites that whites in large part blind and oblivious to the structures of race in the U.S. which privilege ALL whites and disprivilege people of color by attaching differential value to skin, hair, and tongue.
Rating:
Summary: A book that puts an awful lot in perspective....
Review: I've got an awful lot of education in me, and this might be the most important book that I've read left off of every syllabus ever.... In haute culture and academia, the only acceptible slurs allowed are against those poor and white. Whereas a person raised impoverished in Harlem (where I live...) or South Central L.A. might be given compassion, a person raised in Boone County, West Virginia or Paducah, Kentucky would be derrided as "ignotant" or "white trash". The ways in which the poor are portrayed/exploited on Jerry Springer for the entertainment of the masses would be attacked by the Cornell Wests of the black community if the people shown were generally African-American (and rightfully so...) The rich and white just view the people on them as scum, beneath them, and not worth neither time nor pity. Jim Goad searches for a reason why in this book. It's humor betrays some of the bitter points that it makes; if it was a strictly academic book, it would have never been published outside of Appalachia and then, only read by the small subgenre of people into Appalachian studies (read: the study of poor white people and the black people who live near them.... there aren't people of any other color...) As it is, it's found a rather marginal audience. It's a really important book. Everyone should read it: especially those who've read out the Fanon, and W.E.B. du Bois, and Malcolm X... and the people who don't read at all.... and search for an answer WHY the last person who did any meaningful work on the problem of poor white people was Karl Marx..... (betcha someone is going to write me on that point...) PLEASE read this book!!!
Rating:
Summary: Summary: WE ARE FAMILY
Review: The greatest news that none of the reviews below me reveal is that Jim's 3 year old book has enough information in it to chill out extremists on BOTH sides of the racial divide. For that he should probably win a pulitzer, but I don't think it captured the large readership he hoped and I don't think they give national recognition to people who write chapters like "Several compelling arguments for the enslavement of all white liberals", plus white and black racists probably can't even READ and the people the author MOST hates will never cop to how full of their own effervescently shiny PC doo doo they are. There's a few things I would have done differently, (the humorous word play is often too self-indulgent and grows tiresome in parts) but far from being a recruitment manual for mammalian hatred and brute stupidity, this could easily be the book you would WANT to give to someone thinking of joining a white or black extremist group and direct them in a saner, more worldly direction. Alot of people I'm sure will never like the author (he belongs to a breed of obscure, gifted counter culture psychos, cynics, humorists and unbranded first ammendment surfers that do not commonly dominate mainstream writing) or his assimilation of angry, militia-style rhettoric into his writing, but since he was the first to confront some of these issues in a mainstream format (his style resembleing P.J. O' Rourke and George Carlin combined, rather than his usual JD Salinger-with-a-chainsaw approach in his ANSWER Me! zine.), but America, you're going to have to take what you can get. He was here first, so appreciate it for the porcupineish-rusty-promethean creation that it is. The fact is, the world is sometimes downright insane - this is the greatest book for our still race-fixated times. I wonder if the PC world Goad describes is really as bad as he claims and I would love to know how most of the press treated his book. The best solution, if you don't like something, is to lie about it and assimilate it into your philosophy (like the Wall Street Journal claiming, during the early '90s - the height of the Malcolm mania, that Malcolm X was a misunderstood "conservative" who was actually happily humming along with business-as-usual Republican ethics), or just ignore or dismiss it as just a work of humor or a thoughtless reactionary rants. The logic contained thereign is so often flawless I can't imagine how we would hear a peep of protest from anyone. But I can't help remembering the tidal wave of critical disgust concerning the 1993 movie "Falling Down", as being racist, a movie which addresses similar subjects as "Redneck", even though there was no racism in the movie whatsoever. A customer review below writes that white fear of black "insurrection and retaliation" is something that Jim Goad should have covered in his book. Funny, because this is exactley the kind of thinking that almost every sentence in the book is trying to deal with. Retaliation against whom? Whites and blacks BOTH share a similar history and to me, that is the most healing knowledge to come along in hundreds of years. The seperation of POOR whites, blacks and other races was a political tactic invented by RICH whites (not "whites") in order to prevent the laboring class from uniting and revolting. The sooner everyone realizes it, the sooner ALL of us can kick the race-habit the ruling class behind us engineered and get on with our lives. A documentary on white racist groups called "Blood In the Face" from 1990 shows a swasticka-speckled youth robotically saying "It's proven that when the white man gets organized he's an unbeatable force". For the year 2000 zero zero that should be changed to "It's proven that when the WORKING CLASS gets organized, actual progress can be made." So all of you yokels, sambos, spics, injuns, chinks, wops and bobbing yamaka's, chill out the race business. Peace.
Rating: 
Summary: A good opportunity missed!
Review: The title of this book screamed to me from a shelf high above my head while perusing the social science section at Borders Bookstore. "The white folks got a Manifesto -- well, other than the US Constitution that is," I thought. "I have to read this." (That's a joke -- kind of.) Anyway, what I AM interested in is poverty, socioeconomic class construction and its psychological underpinnings, and the maintenance of power. Once I understand the structure, I can change the structure. Poverty doesn't respect skin color; it pushes us ALL to the margins. And just beyond poverty is the abyss. The author dives right into that abyss. I thought and expected this book, for some reason, to be exciting. The first chapters are okay, but beyond that the author goes into a pitiful pearl routine. From a black perspective, I understand and fully sympathize with people who are stigmatized arbitrarily - a lack of wealth being one such. Our society attributes that lack to laziness, and any poor and working class person knows that this is not the case. Back to the point. The author moans about being called a redneck. He finds it insulting. He says that it is tantamount, in theory, to being called a nigger. Fine. He even goes on to give a brief dip into European history - the serf's point of view. I won't say that the author is being disingenuous, but I will say that although similarities in status abound, he glosses over and makes light of critical and historical differences between poor whites and slaves (blacks). Legal issues, property rights (homesteading, for example), self-ownership, and a fear and suspicion of black insurrection and retaliation are just are few areas that ought to be illuminated. This does not go on to say that poor whites have had a cakewalk. However, the author does not speak to any of these things in a real and substantive way. If I were white, after having read this book, I would feel victimized - sure - but I would not feel empowered or hopeful. (Perhaps this is the author's goal and/or these issues are beyond the scope of what he intended to impart. I don't know.) Simply based on the tone of the book, however, I truly suspect that the impetus for writing it came from the author's own early experience of being "someone's nigger," as he has written, and of feeling the yoke of inferiority based on that reality as opposed to feeling some degree of pseudo-superiority that the law no longer guarantees for whites - rich and poor alike. Well, wealth is its own shelter. So, I guess we are mainly talking about guarantees for poor whites. (Sorry) For people new to the subject and/or wanting a better understanding of White history/studies, I recommend books by Jacqueline Jones, David Roediger, and Mathew Frye Jacobson. Their books are more encompassing.
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